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THE CHOKED LIFE. 



SOME THOUGHTS FOE LENT. 




HENRY C: POTTER, D. D 

SECTOR OF GRACE CUUBCH, NEW TORE. 







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<'■■■--- 



NEW YORK : J 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY, 
713 Broadway. 
1873. 



-pn. 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 

E. P. DuTTON AXD Company, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



The Library 
OF Congress 

WASHINGTON 



EIVEESIDE, CABiBRIDGE: 

STEBEOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



'^ THE CHOKED LIFE. 



It is not uncommon for men to specu- 
late as to what would be the least obnox- 
ious form of violent death. There are 
some deaths from which even the most 
iron nerve would at once and instinctively 
recoil. But there are others — if we may 
believe the testimony of science and the 
experience of individuals who have par- 
tially encountered them — which are at 
least not without decided alleviations. 
After the first moment of terror the man 
loses all sense of dying, and, as in th& 
case of drowning, passes, not unfre- 
quently, into a state of painless and de- 
licious dreaminess. Indeed, this seems to 
be more or less true of all forms of death 
by suffocation. There are mortal wounds 
and shocks that leave the tokens of their 
horror behind them, and write their sig- 



4 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

nature in the agonized lineaments of the 
dead whom they have murdered. But 
the young princes in the Tower were 
smothered, and gave no cry nor betrayed 
in their innocent faces any traces of the 
cruel doom that had overtaken them, and 
there are suicides who in some cowardly 
weariness of life have shut themselves up 
at night with the fumes of a charcoal 
furnace, only to be found dead in their 
beds in the morning with faces as calm 
as though they were asleep. It would 
seem as if being stifled or smothered to 
death were a far easier and less agonizing 
form of dissolution than we should at first 
suppose. 

It is no wonder, therefore, that Christ 
employs sufifocation as a type of the grad- 
ual death, which may come to pass in 
man, of his spiritual aspirations. For it 
describes that experience as we may easily 
observe it. If we look at all closely at 
what is going on about us in life, and, at 
what may be going on in ourselves, we 
shall see that the ascendency which evil 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 6 

gains over a human soul is never a sud- 
den and sweeping one, but always grad- 
ual and often unobserved. It is like the 
presence of deadly gases in one's cham- 
ber, or the entrance of water into one's 
lungs. The worst of the evil is accom- 
plished before we are aware of it, and 
delirium or unconsciousness is upon us 
before we are fairly alarmed. No man 
ever gave a vice, a meanness, or a sordid 
ambition a throne in his heart without 
parleying and dallying until his will had 
grown so weak that he could no longer 
resist it. It is the old fable over again, 
of the robber, who first asks, permission 
only to put one foot inside the door, and 
then gradually insinuates, first his hand 
and then his shoulder, until, at length, 
the door flies open wide, and the peasant 
and his household are helpless before 
him. 

It is just thus, as Christ in a Parable 
reminds us, with the Wheat and with the 
Tares which finally overtop, and so stifle, 
and choke and smother the wheat. At 



6 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

the start, the grain and the thistle may- 
seem to have an equal chance, — and they 
do, — ^ for there is nourishment enough in 
the soil for either the wheat or the weed. 
But not enough for both of them. And 
so the weed, which, because it is the 
meaner thing grows the faster (even as 
all meaner things ripen quicker than no- 
bler ones !) takes away the nourishment 
in the soil and shuts out the sun and the 
dew in the air from the slower-climbing 
grain, until at length it stifles it to death. 
Every blade and spear in the wheat-stalk 
is a lung, but when these tuiy lungs 
would fain inhale the sun and the show- 
ers, lo, the sturdy, domineering weed has 
overtopped them, and they can scarcely 
breathe at all. And so, as the weed 
thrives and spreads, knitting itself into the 
soil with a tougher grip and sturdier roots, 
and spreading itself out over the field 
with taller shoots and ampler leafage, the 
wheat dwindles and starves, — suffocated 
literally to death, by the worthless but 
sturdy intruder that has overlaid it. 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 7 

And therefore, Christ implies, what a 
perfect type is the whole destructive pro- 
cess of what sometimes goes on in the soul 
of man, — perfect, alike in the gradual 
stages of its progress, and in the precise 
character of its result. We need not 
stop to dispute with the Schoolmen as to 
what is called the germ theory in theol- 
ogy, for whatever views we may take 
concerning the doctrine of total depravity, 
or as to the possession by man of a seed 
or germ of renewable life, this much at 
least is certain, that there is in every hu- 
man soul, no matter how alienated or ig- 
norant, some dormant hunger, some stifled 
capacity, some aching memory of a lost 
ideal, which, whatever may ultimately be- 
come of it, Christ has meant to be the 
hint of a new and nobler life, at once pat- 
terned after and inspired by his own. 
And at the very start, therefore, every 
man's soul is Uke a field, in which the 
seed, sown there originally, when God 
made man's soul in his own image, and 
sown anew by the teachings of parental 



8 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

• 

love, by tlie Word of God, and by other 
but kindred agencies, since then, struggles 
to hve and grow, and yet is in danger all 
the while of being choked to death. 

And in the Parable already referred to, 
Christ tells us by what. " That which 
fell among thorns are they which, when 
they have heard, go forth and are choked 
with cares, and riches, and pleasures of 
this life." And this brings us to the 
thought which is central to the whole 
matter. Notice here, not merely that 
Christ tells how the soul, like the body, 
may be choked or suffocated to death, 
but most of all that those things which 
are aptest to accomplish this dreary and 
ruinous result are things in themselves 
absolutely and unequivocally innocent. 
Cares, riches, pleasures — there can be 
no such thing as life without having 
something to do with each one of them. 
Every faculty mthin us, pleads trumpet- 
tongued to ply itself, somehow, in con- 
nection with either the toil, the treasure, 
or the enjoyment of life. Nay, more, no 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 9 

healthy career can be lived quite through 
without needing for its right ripening 
that at some point or other it bend under 
cares, or be tested by its stewardship 
(larger or smaller) of treasure, or quick- 
ened by its impulse and refreshed by its 
experience of enjoyment. To live truly, 
at all, is to have every one of these 
things educating us somehow by our daily 
and familiar contact with them into a 
larger life and loftier ; and to renounce 
them utterly and run away from them 
into the pseudo-privacy of any hermit's 
cave or convent cell, is at once an act of 
cowardice and a crime ! 

But because all this is true, is there 
not, nevertheless, very real danger lest 
these innocent things, innocent enough in 
themselves considered, even as a weed is 
innocent, should, domineer so aggressively 
in a man's heart, as ultimately to smother 
or stifle its inmost life to death ? 

Take, for instance, first what we ordi- 
narily call, — (a) The cares of life. It 
would be, verily, a deplorable thing if 



10 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

any one . among us were left free to 
live without cares. And, practically, 
care of various forms, so absolutely en- 
virons every ordinary life that to be 
free from it is simply impossible. But 
it by no means follows that he who 
gives the most time and thought and toil 
to the matter of grappling with these 
cares is living the highest style of life. 
On the contrary, it is entirely possible for 
a man to give himself so absolutely to his 
daily calling, that every added thorough- 
ness in it is only an added evil, bought 
at a price so exorbitant that it had better 
never been bought at all. I know very 
well that 'such a doctrine as this is in di- 
rect contravention of all the noisier teach- 
ing of our age. I know that its utilita- 
rian spirit clamors that the highest use of 
a man in the world is to do his work, 
diligently and thoroughly and well. But 
I take issue with any such teaching, ab- 
solutely. I affirm that the highest aim 
of man is not to do any work whatsoever, 
save as it upbuilds and enlarges and enno- 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 11 

bles himself ! It is not to be wondered 
at that when one sets himself to any task 
in life he should long to perform it com- 
pletely and symmetrically. That long- 
ing is an echo of the divine impulse to- 
ward perfectness in every man, which is 
the signature of the Being who made him. 
But to be so absorbed in the daily round 
of business or housekeeping, of traffic or 
care-taking, that the mind has no strength 
nor desire to rise above it, this is not 
manly service, but ignoble slavery. And 
yet how many men are galled by its 
chain ! As the world stands apart and 
watches them, it cries in noisiest enthusi- 
asm, " What splendid devotion to one's 
business ! See how the plans that the 
man has hatched in his restless brain fly 
out of them, thought out and articulated 
in every least detail ! See how this 
schemer knows how to use men and make 
them supplement himseK ! What mas- 
terly foresight in his calculations ; what 
more than magical swiftness in their 
reaUzation ! Look, ye beginners in life, 



12 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

at the truly successful man, and take 
pattern from his energy and his achieve- 
ment." Aye ! success and achievement, 
but in what ? Come closer to this tireless 
toiler, this penetrating thinker, and see 
how it fares with himself. Verily, the 
man's work is the very perfection of 
achievement, but how is it, meanwhile, 
with the worker ? Will we never learn 
that a man is greater, in God's accoimt, 
than his work, and that in the final anal- 
ysis of human achievement the supreme 
and crucial question will be not " What 
have you wrought in life?" but " What 
has life wrought in you ? " What matters 
it if you have originated the cleverest 
schemes, and conducted them to the most 
brilliant perfection ; what matters it if a 
man has planned and engineered and 
carried to completion some gigantic high- 
way of commerce that binds two hemi- 
spheres in one, if, when it is done, we find 
him chained to one end of his work and 
revolving there in ceaseless devotion to its 
drudgery, like any beast of burden in a 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 13 

treadmill ! It is, verily, a brave thing to 
bend steadfastly and courageously to one's 
task, but to stoop down till one can no 
longer stand erect ; to let your work 
drive you as if you were the veriest gal- 
ley slave; to be so full of the fret and 
worry and burden of a thousand pestifer- 
ous cares that they string and torture you 
like gnats ; and call this anything less 
than a despicable and degrading bondage, 
is a libel on our Maker and ourselves ! If 
He has called me to buy or to sell, to 
hew wood or to draw water, to watch 
the scales that tremble on the humblest 
counter, or to hold those other scales in 
which are weighed the conflicting inter- 
ests of men, — whether He has bidden me 
to be a judge on the bench, in other words, 
or a clerk in the shop, or a journeyman 
on the wall, I will do what my hands or 
brain find to do, and as the Apostle bids 
me, " do it heartily." But to be so eager 
in one's work as to have no eagerness that 
rises above it, this, no matter what the 
world may say, or what the work may be, 



14 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

is not success but failure. There are men 
whose career is like a miner's, — digging 
and delving in a shaft. Time was when 
the man felt the sun, and heard the birds, 
and looked up and saw th|,e stars. But 
every blow of his pick, and every spade 
full of earth that he throws behind him, 
only carries him farther and deeper dovni, 
away from light and warmth and life. 
Time was with many a man when he 
heard a voice which rang in his ears with 
the sound of a trumpet, saying, " Son give 
me thy heart ! " He hears it still, some- 
times. But it is as when one standing at 
the mouth of a mine calls down into its 
cavernous depths. Such an one may sud- 
denly have awakened to the peril of the 
solitary and self-absorbed toiler below. 
There is water rising in a neighboring 
shaft. The man alone there may be cut 
off, and perish without warning. And 
the thought of all this thrills in his 
friend's voice as he cries with all his might 
down the long black-throated abyss which 
yawns wide open before him. But, when 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 16 

the sound reaches the toiler below, it is 
only a faint murmur, an indistinguishable 
sound, and if he hears it at all, he hears 
it only to disregard it. Just so, to-day, 
and right here among us, are men and 
women whose whole life has been a pro- 
cess of digging down^ and now they are 
so far buried and walled over with their 
cares that they are in danger of being 
smothered or stifled to death. 

(S) And as of the cares of the world, 
so of its riches. One cannot wonder that 
men seek wealth not merely because it 
smooths life and softens its asperities, 
but also because, like intellect or char- 
acter or courage, though in a lower and 
inferior way, it is a power, something 
which, in human undertakings, almost 
coerces results. And quite innocently, 
too, as I have implied, a man may desire 
and go after it. But covetousness has 
well been called one of the tyrant pas- 
sions ; and once let the desire of wealth 
for its own sake get rooted in a man's 
heart, and straightway the struggle be- 



16 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

comes a tragic one. O, have I not seen 
one in whom every manly and Christian 
trait had begun to grow and thrive, grad- 
ually turned into a sharp, hard huckster- 
ing hoarder, simply by this mighty pas- 
sion for gold ! Once he was ingenuous 
and tender, and open-handed and uncalcu- 
lating, and now the fresh aspirations that 
once filled his soul with longings to- 
ward unselfish doing for the Master, are 
quenched in the despicable desire to as- 
tonish the world, when he shall go out of 
it, with the accumulations which he has 
left behind him. When he shall go out 
of the world, did I say? Nay, he has 
practically ceased to live and gone out of it 
already ! True, he walks about the streets 
and overreaches other men, and is remorse- 
less in dealing with his creditors, but he 
is nothing but a galvanized corpse, after 
all. If by any means you could lay your 
hand against that inmost organism of the 
man whereby the pulse-beats of the soul 
tell out its life, you would find no answer- 
ing throb, no faintest sign of life. You 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 17 

remember that Italian nobleman who, to 
revenge hhnself upon a woman, doomed 
her to be bricked up in a narrow niche in 
his lonely castle wall. Even so, here and 
to-day, there are men who are piling up 
their golden bricks about themselves. 
Day by day the man stands in his niche 
and builds his golden wall a little higher. 
Brick by brick it rises, contracting as it 
mounts, until the topmost brick is in its 
place, the turn of the arch is completed, 
the last orifice is closed, and behind that 
golden pile there is simply a man stifled 
to death. He is not buried indeed, but 
his manhood is buried. The tares have 
choked the wheat, and so the wheat has 
perished. 

(c) But there are* many of us whose 
better life it is not care or wealth that is 
stifling, but pleasure. It is said quite 
frequently, that we Americans are not in 
danger from too much play but from too 
little. And if, by play, is meant health- 
ful and hearty relaxation, I verily believe 

it. If there is one thing that marks our 
2 



18 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

social life in this generation in contrast 
mth those that have preceded it, it is its 
dreary want of vivacity. But one reason 
for this is that we have mistaken the true 
nature of play or pleasure, and then have 
mistaken its function. Pleasure is not 
a vocation but an interlude, and like 
all truly pleasing interludes, its chiefest 
charm ought to reside in the fact that 
it is largely spontaneous and unstudied. 
If any one of us thinks that God put him 
into the world simply and solely to en- 
joy hunself, then verily he ought to be 
alarmed at the tremendous discrepancy 
between his equipment and his responsi- 
bihties ! Is there no higher function for 
a man's brain and heart than laboriously 
to desire means for having a good tune, as 
it is called ? If I believed so, I think I 
should lose my faith in God, and tm'n in- 
fidel, for I should feel that a Being who 
had endowed his creatures with such 
upward-climbing aspirations for so mean 
and poor an end, could not be worthy of 
the name of God. 



THE CHOKED LIFE. 19 

And therefore, when any one of us has 
come to that point where his Mfe has be- 
come a mere pursuit of pleasure, he may 
be sure that something is Avrong. Already 
he may well be afraid that that stifling 
process has begun in him wherein the 
pleasure-life threatens ultimately to swal- 
low up, and so strangle and choke out all 
other life. And this too, though one's 
pleasures may in themselves considered be 
innocent and harmless and even helpful. 
For pleasure, j List because it is relaxation, 
may easily pass over from relaxation into 
laxity. The nature, too long relaxed and 
indulged, may at length become hope- 
lessly unstrung. And then we have as 
the dreary and hopeless result of it all, a 
class of men and women with whom life 
means simply waiting for a fresh sensa- 
tion. Alas ! have we not met these bur- 
dens and blotches upon humanity, — Epi- 
cureans, without the culture of Epicurus ; 
Grecian in their sensuous hunger for 
something to stimulate the cloyed palate 
and thrill the torpid nerves, but utterly 



20 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

mthout the grace and sunshine and poetry 
of the Greek? Men who will study a 
menu as if it were a play of Shakespeare, 
or a poem of Milton, and women who will 
look forward to a ball-room as if its glare 
disclosed the divinest visions possible to a 
human soul ! And is it for this, O man, 
O woman, that God made you after an 
image so regal and with powers so god- 
hke ? Nay, can you be content to live 
a hfe which only seeks existence for its 
sensuous sweetness, and misses quite its 
grander and sacreder meaning. Have 
you never seen a child, in some crowded, 
overheated room, Avhere the air was 
heavy and tainted, press its hand to its 
side and gasp, fairly, in its faint, half -dizzy 
longing for a cooler, purer atmosphere ? 
And, are there no moments in your own 
experience when, half -stifled in this cease- 
less roimd of gayety and pleasure-seek- 
ing, your soul has gasped for loftier and 
purer airs, and your dissatisfied affections 
have cried out in their utter weariness and 
satiety, " O God ! is this to live ? Is 



TBE CHOKED LIFE. 21 

there nothing worthier than this endless 
round of vulgar self-indulgence, where 
the soul is dragged down into the foetid 
sluices of the flesh, and where all existence 
is turned. into a ceaseless, aimless feeding 
of the senses ? " 

Tell me, has there been nothing like 
that, whispered at least to yourself if 
not uttered in the ears of others ? For if 
there has, then remember that it is the 
struggHng of that deepest life in you, 
choked and smothered now by the tares, 
but striving not quite to die. In God's 
name, I pray you give it a chance to live ! 
Ask Him, whose Cross is the witness of 
his love for you to help you to pluck up 
the tares ! Cry to Him to send, if need be, 
all roughest winds, all sharpest frosts, if 
by any means He will uproot and choke 
out the weeds that are strangling and 
starving your soul's life. God made you 
to bear fruitage for Himself. See whether, 
during this Lent, you cannot do something 
to give his grace in you a better chance ! 
Are there no weeds for you yourseK to 



22 THE CHOKED LIFE. 

grapple with ? Is there nothing in you 
which is choking the seed which the Spirit 
has sown in your heart ? Let it not "be 
said at last that that seed was sown in 
you in vain ! 










l^enrt C. l^otter. 



GUIDE TO A DEVOUT LIFE. 

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A carefully systematized plan of directions, which, for sound sense 
and real pietv, we have never seen equaled. — An English Chit>ch 
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Will be found to be among the very best and most useful of devo- 
tional books. — The Churchman. 

It is, without exception, the best book of the kind I have ever seen, 
and it would be difficult, it seems to me, for any one to make a better, 
— A City Rector. 

BREAK UP YOUR FALT.OW GROUND. 

A Help to Self- Examination. By the Rev. G. H. Wilkinson, 
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COME TO THE MISSION. 

A Leaflet for Distribution at Mission Services. By the Rev. G. H. 
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WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT PRAYER. 

Questions relating to Prayer answered in the Words of the Bible. 
with References. By G- W. Moon. Paper, 34 pages; 10 cents. 

LENTEN DISCIPI.INE. 

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Setting forth, in an attractive form, the value of Retirement, Self- 
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HELPS TO A HOLY LENT. 

By the Rt. Rev. F. D. Huntington, D. D., Bishop of Central 
New York. Third edition. i6mo, 20S pages; $1.25. 

A rich treasury filled with beautiful, living thoughts, the power and 
attraction of which will be confessed by all who give the work due 
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Being Letters to an Indifferent Believer. A Tract for Parish use. 
By the Bishop of Central New York. Paper ; 25 cents. 

Sent by mail, postage-paid, on receipt of price. 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY," 

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